Households are accumulating a variety of digital electronics devices including computers, digital still and video cameras, televisions, compact disk (CD) players and recorders, digital video disk (DVD) players and recorders, personal digital assistant devices, and mobile phones. Files created by or stored upon these devices include images, audio recordings, and audio visual recordings in a variety of formats.
Efforts are underway to make digital electronics devices more interoperable and to allow sharing of files among them (e.g., Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA), “Overview and Vision White Paper,” Digital Living Network Alliance, 2004, which is incorporated herein by this reference in its entirety). For example, a CD stored on an audio system in one room might be played upon a second sound system in another room without the user having to physically extract the CD from the first system and insert it into a component of the second one. To conform to the DLNA interoperability standards, a device will be required to support at least a minimum set of canonical digital media file formats, and to convert any other formats into the canonical formats of the corresponding medium type. Adapters will be available to retrofit legacy devices to conform to the standards.
A central element of the resulting envisioned home media management system is a digital media adapter (DMA), an apparatus that provides a user interface into the digital media content. Presently, there are a wide assortment of DMA's—the consumer electronics vertical has not yet settled upon normative behavior for this class of devices. Generally, however, a DMA is a network device that allows a user to browse media content available on a home local area network from a monitor or television set, and to ask that specified content be presented (henceforth, to “present” digital content will mean to show, display, or play it, as the case may be) on a compatible device. The media content is stored in digital files that physically reside in a file server, such as a computer hard drive or a network-attached storage device. The digital media files are actually managed by a media content server, which is a computer equipped with media content management software that carries out requests from the DMA. In other words, the DMA is a thin client of the media content server, essentially a processor with a software stack, typically having no hard disk drive of its own. Presently, a DMA typically offers a graphical user interface (GUI) exclusively, but there is no reason why such a device could not be driven electronically by software commands.
A user might want to transfer digital media content outside the home for a variety of reasons. For example, photos might be transferred to a lab for printing. Today, the user must either manually port a storage device, such as a flash card or a CD, containing the image files to the photolab, or purchase software for her home computer to transfer the files across a wide area network (WAN) such as the Internet. Because of the aggregate size of the image files copied, currently the typical transfer time may be long, sometimes several hours. Even with a high bandwidth connection, upload speeds provided by Internet service providers are usually systematically significantly slower than those for downloads. During an upload, the user's computer responds sluggishly and certain tasks, such as rebooting to activate software updates, must be postponed to avoid aborting the image upload.
When someone's house is damaged or destroyed, they quickly realize that family photographs and home videos are irreplaceable. The risk of losing such files can be significantly reduced by routinely transfering them from the home to a remote site for backup. Obviously, many types of files other than media files, such as family financial records, ought to be backed up remotely as well. Performing such backups also requires specialty software, and like the software for remote photo-processing, an upload can significantly degrade home computer system usability when a large quantity of information is transferred.
Another digital media file transfer from the home occurs when a person plans to carry a CD containing music to his workplace, or a home video to the house of a friend. There are a number of disadvantages to this manual process. The item might be forgotten, simply left at home. The medium can get lost or damaged. CD's left at the office cannot be played at home, and conversely. It is impossible to keep such physical media well-organized and indexed, and at the same time available for immediate use at both home and away locations.